nizar hassan...

Earlier this year, as a guest of the 2007 Sydney Arab Film Festival, Nizar Hassan, from Palestine, spoke strongly (and dogmatically) around some issues of Arab-centred work processes. I flicked him an email last week inviting a few words towards this 3arabi discussion, and unfortunately he said that he was “in deep deep coma” still working on a film, between Beirut filming and Paris editing…

At the risk of misquoting him, I’ll refer to my rough notes I scribbled during a Forum of the Sydney Arab Film Festival: ‘Under Siege’ – seminar and screenings - 17 March 2007 at Liverpool. Although the discussion is related to filmmaking, I do think that the concepts can be transferred to other processes, whether cultural production or theory and research. [And how rare to do something with the usual compulsive note taking?!]

• Concept / term ‘under siege’ is problematic – ‘resistance’ is not; direct the discourse towards what we want, how we are gonna fight – not a ‘please don’t beat us’ mentality; we are not weak, we have hope; they will call us ‘terrorists’ regardless, as long as we are Arabs who have hope
• Question victimology
• Pride in Arabness
• [Scathing towards] (small L) liberals
• [Critical of] ‘native informants’ giving the point of view from within
• Analysis of well-known Palestinian films where the ‘informant’ filmmakers ‘explain to the other’ – e.g. Michel Khleifi’s ‘Wedding in Galilee’ – includes limited views of resistance of patriarchy, orientalist scenes, etc
• [Critical of] a new kind of Arab liberal, who believes that change can only come with american support and western values
• In Nizar Hassan’s short film ‘Tahady’ (Challenge): despite a commission to make a film about the killing of Mohamad Al Durra by the Israeli military, he deliberately chose not to use that internationally used image / footage, so as not to ‘victimize ourselves over and over again’; [that film also includes a great ‘brainstorm’ about the contradictions of process, of critical questions, a very ‘inside’ Palestine debate]
• There is a formula in how to tell the story of the victim; informants work with formulae, bringing the formula to the ruler; informants accept the formula as ‘universalistic’ – so that ‘the west can understand it’
• The need to recognize and to break the formula
• In filmmaking, allow the characters to lead the structure and to tell the story – allow the characters and the filmmaker (within the film) to confront themselves; the story belongs to both the filmmaker and the characters, it is about these relationships
• Importance of self-criticism
• [Critical of] liberal thinking of ‘the other’
• Aesthetic of active resistance
• The huge Egyptian film industry is the hope; it sees only its own reality as the universe
• Lebanese / Syrian / African film industries rely on western money, leading to compromise, descriptive cinema, the aesthetic of the informant; production houses also have their own agendas e.g. ‘the conflict’
• Break the production reality by becoming the subject, not the object
• We need to analyse our own reality, take the centre (with people who want to resist with us), we need to change, and resist being ‘under siege’

After a long, loud and stirring speech, the discussion included:
• The notion of ‘informants’ as ‘cultural collaborators’
• The danger of ‘coconuts’ – black on the outside, white on the inside – ‘raas al abed’ (chocolate covered marshmallow sweet)